Dancing in the Dark

Talbott nodded.

“Excuse me,” said one of the two women, a brunette with swept-up hair, a little hat, and a dark twill suit. Up close she looked more like forty than twenty, but still not bad.

Her younger, blond companion, in a tan dress, hovered behind her.

“Yes,” I said.

“Could we have an autograph?” the brunette said.

I looked at Astaire, who nodded.

The woman came up with a pad of paper from her purse and placed it in front of the startled Willie Talbott.

“If you’d just write, ‘To Gretchen from her friend Brian Aherne.’ ”

Talbott took the pad and the fountain pen Gretchen offered and signed.

“Thank you,” said the woman with a grin, looking at the autograph and inscription and showing it to her friend, who said, “I thought you spelled your name ‘Aherne.’ ”

“That’s my stage and movie spelling,” Talbott said. “The traditional family spelling is ‘Ahurn’ and I promised my mother before she died that I’d always use the family spelling, even in contracts.”

“You don’t have an English accent?” the blonde said.

“Lost it years ago. Now. .” Talbott said with a sigh, “I have to fake it. I could tell you about the family history if you’re really interested.”

The blonde looked at her friend, who encouraged her with a nod.

“Well, I can give you my. .”

“Remember you’re leaving town, Mr. Aherne,” I reminded Talbott.

“Right,” he said. “Sorry, ladies.”

The women nodded their good-byes and walked away, looking at the autograph.

“You don’t look anything like Brian Aherne,” I said.

“People think I look like Sonny Tufts,” said Talbott, finishing the last crumb on his plate and wiping his hands on a paper napkin. “Well, if you’ve got the five hundred, I’m ready to go home and pack and give you the list.”

“The man has hutzpah,” said Astaire.

“Chutzpah,” Talbott corrected. “With a ch at the beginning and you make the ch sound like you’re trying to bring something bad up that you ate for lunch.”

“Thanks for the Yiddish lesson,” Astaire said, looking at me.

“We can go now, Mr. Aherne,” I said.

Talbott searched around for something else to eat, didn’t find it, and stood reluctantly. “Two-fifty in advance and the rest in cash when I hand you Luna’s schedule and give you my ideas about who to look for?”

“We’ll have to stop at my bank,” said Astaire, also rising.

Talbott kept talking as Astaire drove and listened to the radio. “Songs by Morton Downey” came on and Raymond Paige’s Orchestra played a smooth introduction to “Old Man River” after the announcer told us of the joys of drinking Coca-Cola. I didn’t even bother to grunt at the pauses in Talbott’s patter. My behind was now a tender red welt that felt every pebble under the tires. Talbott’s apartment in Venice was in a three-story pink building about two miles from the Pacific Ocean.

Astaire cruised past the entrance and we scanned the street, looking for the bulldog and the Saint Bernard. There was no sign of them or any other creditors, at least none that Talbott recognized, though he thought the two sailors with a young, overly made-up girl between them looked suspicious.

“Pull in there,” Talbott said, pointing to a driveway between two apartment buildings that looked just like the one he lived in.

Astaire pulled in and we went down a narrow concrete path to an open space and three garage doors. “I’ll turn the car around,” Astaire said.

I nodded, and Talbott leaned forward from the back seat to say, “Look, I know you’re damn good, but anyone can learn. Right? So, I’ll throw in a couple of special steps I learned at the feet of the great one.”

“You’ll teach me some dance steps?” Astaire said, looking over his shoulder at Talbott, who nodded.

“Steps I learned from Harvey Burke himself.”

“Harvey Burke?”

“Himself,” said Talbott, opening the door. “Two-fifty up front. We’ll stop at your bank on the way to the bus station.”

Astaire pulled out his wallet and came up with, “Two hundred and four.”

Talbott took the money and stuffed it into his pocket. “You know Harvey Burke’s pancake-and-picture method, right?” he said, looking at Astaire and then at me.

“We’ll talk about it later,” Astaire said.

Talbott got out of the car and so did I. A throbbing tuchus made it tough to keep up with Talbott, who went through a heavy white door and started up a flight of steel steps. We clanked upward in the early-afternoon light that beamed down through a dusty skylight. At the third-floor landing we went through another door and down a corridor past apartments on both sides.

After a right turn we went through a fire-exit door, across a gravel-covered roof, and stepped over the low wall where two buildings pressed against each other. Across this roof and then over another low wall.

“What the hell are we doing, Twinkle-Toes?”

“Making sure,” he said as we headed for a steel door on the third roof.

“You come this way a lot?” I asked.

“When skies are cloudy and gray,” he said with a confident grin.

I didn’t care for this new air of confidence. I followed him down a short flight of stairs and along a corridor. He stopped at an apartment. Down the hall someone was playing Buddy Clark’s “Hugo and Igo.”

“That’s the stairway down,” he said softly, gesturing. “Keep an eye and ear on it. Somebody comes, give me a call and we’ll get the hell out of here. It’ll only take me a couple of minutes.”

He went in and closed the door while I waited in the corridor.

Buddy Clark sang on and two minutes passed, or what seemed like two minutes. My old man’s watch on my wrist seemed to indicate that time had gone backwards.

I tried the handle of Talbott’s apartment. It was open.

The place was a mess. Twinkle-Toes may have been a lousy housekeeper but this was abusing the privilege. Someone had been through the place, tossed and turned it.

“Willie,” I called, stepping over a faded tan pillow that had been thrown from the sofa against the wall.

No answer.

The place wasn’t big. Living room, kitchen combination, and what looked like a bedroom on the left. The door was closed. I avoided a purple table lamp on the floor. The lamp had lost its shade. I turned and picked up the lamp. I didn’t know if I would need a weapon.

I opened the door and looked into Talbott’s bedroom, a horror of seduction-purple velvet and dirty white. The bedding and mattress had been ripped to shreds. My lamp and I went to the closed door beyond the bed. I tripped on a small radio but kept my balance. I pushed open the door and found a small empty bathroom. The window over the tub was open. I went for it and heard a shot. There was a narrow space between Talbott’s apartment building and the next one. I could imagine Talbott, who knew the best ways in and out, inching his way to the windowsill and then reaching up to the roof and pulling himself up. There was no way I could make it through that space, even if I were thirty and didn’t have a sore ass.

I could hear footsteps on the gravel of the next roof. I dropped the lamp and hurtled through the maze of bad taste that littered the floor. I ran down the corridor and up to the roof the way we had come. I looked to my left, saw nothing, and then looked right, where Talbott lay sprawled facedown on the next roof, his left knee bent, his right hand over his head as if he were about to demonstrate one of those steps he had promised Astaire. There was nobody else in sight, but the door to the roof a few feet from Talbott was open.

The space between the two buildings was only a couple of feet. I climbed on the wall and jumped and tumbled, rolling over on my right shoulder and tearing my poplin jacket.

I ran to the edge of the roof at the rear of the building and leaned over. A small space between garages. No people. I ran to the front of the building. Someone was getting into a dark car right below me. The car was parked